03 February 2006

Support Your Local Gay Bar

So night before last some nutcase walks into a gay bar in New Bedford, Massachusetts, asks if it's a gay bar, buys a drink, walks back to the pool table, then starts wielding a hatchet on the folks there. When the patrons fight back, the wack job whips out a gun and starts shooting. (My neurons are straining, trying to complete some kind of connection to some Eddie Murphy routine about getting your ass kicked by faggots.) This is not the kind of thing straight people, well maybe excepting postal workers and patrons, worry about happening to them, and even the postal workers don't have a chorus whining day-in and day-out on Fox News about some kind of equivalence between their lives and a "culture of death." Our USA-grown Christianists are less far removed from the world's Islamacists than we might like to think.

So, get your ass out there tonight. To a gay bar. Buy someone a drink. Buy a bartender a drink. Not into the "bar scene?" Get over it. Happily coupled? Take your sweety out for a beer. Don't drink booze? Have bottled water. Not gay? Just be cool about it.

I don't let the fact that some postal employee loses it stop me from going to the post office, and I'm not going to let the fact that some hate-filled psycho tried to off some gay people in a bar stop me from having a beer with other gay people.